Farm of the Week: Brothers play their part in a scientific approach

Brothers Charlie and Alaric Booth have the usual range of farmers' grumbles – prices, pigeons, politicians, Europe.

But they also have an advantage many rivals would give a tractor for – an agronomist in a shed in their yard at Smeathalls Farm, on the River Aire, opposite Kellingley pit, with Ferrybridge power station to the west and Drax to the east.

The man in the shed – well, Portakabin – is Philip Marr, a senior man with Masstock, a consultancy and supplier started by two Irish brothers which now has 450 agronomists and a turnover of 350m.

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Now 64, he became a consultant to Smeathalls Farm in 1991, when the Booth brothers' father, Christopher, was moving towards retirement, and got their permission to run some experiments there.

He was working for Ryehill Farm Services of Hull, which was taken over by Masstock in 1995. Masstock liked what he was doing and Smeathalls officially became the Brotherton Masstock Smart Farm. The Brotherton bit is the postal location.

The rest of the tag means Masstock puts advice into almost everything Charlie, 47, and Alaric, 51, decide to do. The brothers reciprocate by providing space and labour for Phil Marr's experiments, on a thousand plots, using 18-20 of the 800 acres they run – half owned and half rented.

They get some payment for harvest foregone and for the trouble of a thousand professional visitors a year. Masstock gets real-life authority for its advice and a showcase which brings in custom. And Phil is a free third point of view in any discussion about what the commercial core of Smeathalls Farm should be doing next.

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The idea has taken off. Masstock has organised a conference and exhibition to explain it, and the rest of its work, at Bishop Burton College, East Yorkshire, on Thursday. The college has a farm partnership with Masstock and there are 25 similar between Inverness and Devon.

Other companies have copied the idea but Phil Marr reckons his team have the edge, thanks to the long start from Brotherton, where he has trialled 400 varieties of wheat and nearly 290 of oilseed rape, not to mention rye, barley, oats and other crops.

His findings have fed into experiments on other partner farms and they have fed back to him. Manufacturers loan soil preparation and planting machinery for their experiments.

The starting point of all this was the beginning of the boom in crop varieties. All of a sudden, the seed houses were bombarding farmers with alternatives, along with optimistic summaries of their likely performance. In the labs and greenhouses and experimental allotments, they all promised one great advantage or another. But Alaric Booth sums up: "Most of them were rubbish."

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Phil Marr realised that early and put it to his employers that their advice would have more authority if they did their own tests. He began systematic comparisons of how new varieties compared with old, and with each other.

Some did brilliantly some of the time but the farmer wants reliability and that is rare. One wheat variety which did give it was Clare, which came on the market in 1995 and is still around. Castile gives good results if drilled in August, but no later, and has survived six years. Hundreds of others have come and gone.

Phil says: "The genetic potential of any seed type is to yield 25 tonnes of wheat per hectare – 11.5 tonnes in the case of oilseed rape. Those figures are from experiments and calculations and you never get there, of course. You probably lose 30 per cent of potential as soon as you plant, because no land is perfect. When you plant is a factor.

"The number of seeds you have competing in a square metre is a factor whose importance we have only cottoned onto relatively recently. How you prepare the ground, how you feed the crop, how you deal with weeds and diseases, are all part of the jigsaw."

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Alaric added : "And that's not to mention the weather, which can change everything at any time."

After 20 years of playing with combinations of all these factors, Phil says he could be busy for another hundred if the scientists never came up with another variety.

But every time another chemical is banned, or the price of fertiliser rises, the equations of farming change and plant breeders go back to work.

This year's winter wheats on the Brotherton farm are JB Diego, for seed, Alchemy and Cordiale, and current oilseed rapes are Excalibur, Compass and, for a particular contract, V141 HOLL. But the wheat choice is under review because of the Ensus plant on Teesside, buying for bio-ethanol. The market for rapeseed is also changing, thanks to growing demand from the likes of KFC and McDonalds for low-calorie cooking oil.

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Everything depends on what you want and where and when you want to grow it, says Phil Marr. But you have to think about it. Optimising the yield of oilseed rape can make a difference, he estimates, of two tonnes a hectare, at 220 a tonne.

"You do need an agronomist," says Charlie Booth. "We have actually tried just planting a crop and leaving it, to see what would happen. The answer is nothing." Even with the help, the brothers find the market hard – thanks, in their opinion, to the manipulation of crop prices by hedge fund speculators. Their father had 300 acres when he took them on, Charlie comments. Now, with 800, they cannot afford to employ their own sons. Their combine harvester cost 250,000 and has to be contracted out to even begin to pay for itself.

"Anywhere else in industry you would want an investment like that back in six months," says Charlie. "In farming, you will be lucky if you ever get it back."

The brothers considered an anaerobic digester, as recommended by Defra. But having seen the new tariff for electricity fed into the grid from renewable sources, they say the sums simply do not work. Send your comments on that to [email protected] or call 0113 238 8426.

Ring 01759 301144 to book for the Masstock event at Bishop Burton on Thursday, March 11.